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McNealy Created Millions of Jobs?
cahiha writes "In his blog, Jonathan Schwartz argues that Scott McNealy is single-handedly responsible for making network computing a reality. His timeline is something like that in 1992, the industry was focused on 'Chicago' (Windows 95), while McNealy bravely went his own way-- 'the network is the computer.' He goes on to claim that 'There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than [Scott McNealy]. [...] I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions.' I have trouble following his argument: client/server computing and distributed computing were already widely available and widely used in the early 1990s. The defining applications of the emerging Internet were, not Java, but Apache, Netscape, and Perl. Sun's biggest response to Chicago was to attempt to establish Java as the predominant desktop application delivery platform, something they have not succeeded at so far. So, what do you think: is Schwartz right in giving credit to McNealy for creating
'millions' of jobs? Or has Sun been a company on the decline since the mid-1990s, only temporarily buoyed by the Internet bubble?"
I think there is some confusion here. To the best of my knowledge the success of Microsoft and their ability to provide a relatively low cost and consistent client for application development and deployment for applications has had much more of an impact that anything that Sun has developed. Without a client, what good is the network? Take a look at the "network thin client" as an example. Where is it today?
Despite so many online and network applications, many business users need to function offline.
Java is also quite a moot point nowadays. The write once run anywhere model maybe a factor on the server side; however, on the client side for enterprise customers simply not an issue. What enterprise customers run multiple client platforms successfully? Few and at what cost?
If anyone should be rewarded for providing millions of jobs for the world, it should be Bill Gates. Mock his OS all you want, nobody is perfect. But just take a look around and count the number of jobs directly affected by Microsoft products and compare that to those directly affected by Sun's.
-If software and hardware all worked perfectly, I'd be without a job.
Although I question the numbers, (they are a bit high), I will say that I was employed right out of college because I could manage Sun servers and Solaris. From there, I learned, and used other Un*x and Un*x like operating systems. Today, 95% of what I do is still running on the same operating systems. Was McNealy the only reason? Nope! But, he sure did help early on.
He should be on everyone's Christmas card list!
I'd say, in recent history, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee did the world a great favor by making HTML so easy to use and forgiving (i.e., not closing a tag doesn't cause the page to crash, unlike syntax errors in 'real' programming languages), then NCSA gets credit for making a great browser, then Marc and Jim deserve credit for stealing all that NCSA talent (and possibly some code) to make a really cool browser, and oh yeah, before I get too far, let's not forget Bob's Ethernet, and whoever made TCP/IP, and I guess we need to include K&R and everyone else who made UNIX, because that's what the Internet has mostly run on through its history. And as great as the network is, it's prety useless without nodes, and Bill Gates' *ahem* methods of popularizing DOS and then Windows has put ten times more nodes out there than all other contributors combined.
But some guy in the corner with a "vision" that just happens to align with what eventually occurred? Fuck him. If anything, that honor should go to Vannevar Bush, who, in 1945, had a pretty damn accurate vision of what computing would be like in the 1990s. Considering that he wrote this a year before ENIAC was unveiled, I think we can give him a pass on not predicting network storage.
(On page 4, look for 'memex.')
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"Jonathan Schwartz is making the same mistakes that got McNealy and Sun into trouble. Instead of concentrating on creating new avant-garde technologies"
.. September 1995 .. recommending Microsoft "jump on the Java bandwagon and take control" of its class libraries and run times"
You mean like Java. What got Sun into trouble was Microsoft sabotaging Java on the desktop. Remember when they brought out an incompatible Microsoft Jave version. Wilfully breaking the write once run anywhere option. The one thing Java was supposed to do well. "McNealy launched a Microsoft and Linux-bashing propaganda campaign."
When someone launches a campaign to destroy your company and you comment on it how is that propaganda. His biggest mistake was in settling the long running court case.
a memo
Now we see Schwartz using the same hype tactics. It's a shame because I liked the old Sun. I really did. Will it return? I am not so sure anymore.
Are you seriously sugesting that Suns decline had nothing to do with Microsofts tactics.
davecb5620@gmail.com
If anyone should be thanked, it should be Bill Gates and Microsoft
Well, no. Microsoft didn't do anything for the Internet. A little Australian company called Trumpet Software produced Trumpet Winsock which allowed Windows machines to connect to the Internet, well before Microsoft ever cared about it.
Why? This seems to be a popular opinion on Slashdot, and I'm curious why people need it to be any more open than it is? I mean afaik, the only thing that isn't "open" about it is the spec. If you want to create your own implementation of a JVM you're allowed but it must conform to the spec. This is a very *good* thing IMO. It would really suck if MS had been able to complete its "embrace and extend" manuever on Java (which is what MS has done with the open web standards and browsers) and it would suck even more if there were 5 different JVM's out there and you had to tailor your code to run on each one. You would completely lose the WORA (or you'd have to do all sorts of gimmicky crap to figure out what jvm you were running on -thats a lot of fun with browsers and html, I think it would be even more annoying with code). So I ask again, not rhetorically, but honestly: why open source it? Am I missing something?
I absolutely agree that having conformant java specifications is a great thing, and is perhaps the single most important reason for Java's success. But I don't see why being open source should conflict with this - there should be no reason why an open source product should not have to pass the tests in order to be called 'Java'. In fact there is a current project, called 'Harmony', that intends to do exactly this. Open source need not permit 'embrace and extend'.
I can understand that there are potential problems with open sourcing Sun's implementation of Java - there are most likely huge amounts of code that involve patented techniques or are licensed from other sources.
I like open source (or at least having the source) because I have had to deal with problems in closed source products that won't be fixed by the vendor. I am not after re-selling the product, or re-distributing the source, but the possibility of patching something myself is pretty appealing.
DEC had "The Network is the System" painted on its trucks in the 80's. I was there from '80 to '98.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
I know it's meant as a joke, but since it's not true, it's even less funny? What do Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn say..? and A Salon.com Gore Internet Invented Article or More Gore Internet Invented, Invention Research ...don't you think?
I don't know that I'd say Sun created that wave, but neither were they a small part. Remember that for some time (at least a couple of years, IIRC) after the Mosaic browser, the killer app was still email. For all I know, there are still more mail than Web packets on the backbones. Anybody have any figures?
But it was definitely those relatively innexpensive Sun workstation class machines that powered much of DNS, mail, FTP, and gopher, in the days before the Web, and for at least a couple of years after the Web.
I have to call Sun a *major* contributor. To the extent that we're perhaps 3-5 years further along than we would have been without them, though there's absolutely no way to verify that SWAG.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
Java has several Free Software implementations, and the only real limitation they have is that they can't use the Java trademark. Kaffe, after a long absense, is back and is already mostly 1.4 compliant, GCJ takes an entirely different approach to implementing Java which is both innovative and supportive of what already exists.
Java will not die, whatever happens to Sun.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
NeWS fell by the wayside because MIT (and DEC?) gave us X11. That such a large and complex software system was created from scratch just to be given away for free was truly mindblowing. It was obvious that X11, because of its unemcumbered license, was the horse to bet on.
No. The people you owe that to is AT&T's lawyers. The reason why Unix became (pseudo) Open Source is that AT&T was a legislated monopoly. Part of their consent decree was that they couldn't go into markets outside of Telephones, and they couldn't supress technology.
This got them into a rather tight bind. When someone asked AT&T to send them a copy of Unix (so that they could use the chess program that was written on it), the lawyers tried to nix the sale complaining that they'd be sued for going outside the Unix market -- so they got sued for not releasing UNIX.
Having lost the lawsuit, they started selling UNIX systems and were promptly sued a second time -- this time for releasing UNIX. They also lost this second suit.
The lawyers looked at the seemingly conflicting decisions and found that, while they couldn't restrict the UNIX technology, neither could they market or support it.
Their solution was that -- for the appropriate price (depending on whether you were a university or company) and signing an interesting non-disclosure agreement, you got a tape dump of a running UNIX box (including source) and a hearty "good luck!". You could share source/fixes with other institutions who had a similar license (( which soon turned out to include just about every major university )), but not with that uninteresting portion of the universe known as "anybody else".
This managed to satisfy both lawsuits because they were now neither marketing/supporting UNIX nor keeping it closeted.
Thus it is that the pseudo-open-source nature of UNIX was a legal kludge, not a conscious plan on the part of Thompson, Ritchie or anybody else. I expect that, if AT&T had had their original way, they would have never released the source to UNIX -- and it would have thus remained a little-known, ill-supported niche system.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.